


The Indulgence of Time

by MemeKon



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: First Kiss, Fluff and Humor, Future Fic, Getting Together, Kid Fic, M/M, Self-Indulgent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2019-02-23 00:45:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13178760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MemeKon/pseuds/MemeKon
Summary: “So,” he asks a couple weeks later, after Derek has dropped by again, unannounced, with a couple of grocery bags and a felt toy for Erica, “when are you leaving, again?”And if it sounds a little desperate, it’s because he is.He really,reallyis.Derek is— the thing is: when they’re not in mortal peril, Derek is distressingly charming and attractive, and he’s like a baby whisperer, and Stiles has always kind of wanted to bone him, ever since he was a scrawny, horny little shit of a teen who thought he was gonna become Lydia Martin’s kept husband some day, and— he’s just not good at the ‘not falling for unattainable people’ thing. He sucks at it. Big time.“I’m not,” Derek says then, and Stiles could literallycry.





	The Indulgence of Time

**Author's Note:**

> So I started this 49587459 years ago. And finally decided to finish it tonight. For reasons.  
> Unbeta'ed.

“I’m taking her in.”

Scott and his dad both turn to look at him; Scott looks shocked, but not unpleasantly so. His eyebrows are raised and he looks like he’s barely avoided going for open mouthed staring. He looks like seventeen year old Scott, up till he moves his left hand where it’s resting on the table and his wedding ring glints at Stiles, reflecting some of the room’s light.

His dad is squinting his eyes at him. He doesn’t look disapproving, but he does have the wrinkles around his mouth and on his forehead that broadcast _what are you thinking right now, son?_ clear as day to him.

Emily and Grant, thankfully, don’t seem that taken aback by his Alpha and his dad’s reaction; they are just clasping hands tightly, looking at him with wide eyes, practically holding their breath.

Leah, Emily’s legal guardian and Alpha, sits next to them, a comforting hand touching the inside of Emily’s elbow. Unlike the other two, she does take notice of Scott and his dad’s reaction, and for a few seconds looks unconvinced about the ordeal, before she reins herself in and goes back to a carefully polite expression.

“If that’s okay,” Stiles adds then, his hands and the bridge of his nose sweaty. “I can-- I could take care of her.”

“You could?” Leah asks, and she’s cool and composed, and looks exactly like the kind of person Stiles would fall for, sharp and cutting, and looking at him like she couldn’t be bothered to hide her slight contempt or her doubts about his general capabilities to spare his feelings even if there was actual money involved for her.

“He’s got a stable job, and his own place,” Scott backs him up then, patting Stiles on the back and letting his hand linger for a little while there, a reassuring pressure that Stiles leans into a little bit.

“My son is as trustworthy as you’ll get around here, Alpha--”

“Johnson,” Leah gives the sheriff a tight lipped smile.

Emily leans into her Alpha’s space with some trouble, her baby bump more visible when she moves, and looks up at her. Once she’s got her attention, the girl mouths the words _I like him_ at her.

She doesn’t seem as convinced as her beta, but she still gives her a reassuring smile and a light arm squeeze.

She turns to look at Stiles, doesn’t hide the way she’s taking in his appearance, does a tiny eyebrow raise when her eyes fall on his scuffed up sneakers with one of the laces so frayed that it’s practically a couple of uses away from giving up the ghost on him.

“I can assure you,” Scott starts, leaning into Stiles’ space and holding the back of his neck, voice earnest, “that he is qualified for this.”

Leah’s shoulders sag a little under the force of Scott’s candor, and she ends up nodding at him, if maybe a little tight lipped.

“I trust you, Alpha McCall.”

 

 

Emily decides to stay with him until she gives birth.

She acts like the decision is something that she mulls over, something that she’s considering carefully, but underneath all that Stiles can see that she made her mind as soon as the offer was on the table.

Leah doesn’t look entirely pleased with the arrangement, but she respect Emily’s choice, gives her a look full of meaning and affection before she looks back to Scott and then Stiles and nods in agreement, and Stiles can see that whatever’s going on there that’s making this look like the best deal for Emily, she is not alone in her corner.

Grant doesn’t say much the whole time, mostly looking as overwhelmed as any kid in this kind of situation would be, but he holds Emily’s hand as they all work out how this whole thing is gonna work, and when Leah stands up to shake Scott’s hand, he hugs Emily and gets hugged in return.

 

 

“You are sure breaching some boundaries there,” Stiles mutters before stuffing his mouth full of cereal.

Emily keeps looking through his pantry, one hand on her round, protruding belly. “I think I’m allowed to want to know the guy who’s gonna raise the bean a little better,” she replies, after a while, sounding unaffected and humorous, even as she has to get on her tippy toes to reach to the back of his cupboards.

Not for the first time, Stiles wonders how she manages to be so cheerful at eight fucking a.m. Especially when he knows for a fact that she spends half the night up most days.

“It’s the hormones, I think,” she tells him, as though she can read his mind. “I was never a morning person before I got pregnant.”

 

 

"I used to be a vegetarian," Emily tells him after she wipes out two triple burgers. "I listened to The Beatles, and that lead to being a hardcore McCartney fan— the annoying kind, you know?—, and that lead to vegetarianism. Soy burgers just aren't cutting it now, though." She smiles impishly, and points towards her seven-and-a-half month bump.

Stiles smiles back at her and then points towards her face.

"You've got some barbecue sauce on your nose."

"Oh, shit," she cleans her face up fast and struggles to look over Stiles' shoulder at the bar, "did the cute waitress see?"

"Let me ask my third eye, the one on the back of my head," he deadpans at her before stuffing a couple of curly fries into his mouth.

"You are the worst," she hisses at him, even though the glint in her eyes belies her indignation.

"What about Grant, anyway?" He asks after he swallows.

She hums a little and then slurps at her milkshake noisily. It makes Stiles happy for her that she's taking up so much more space than when she first arrived, that she's all the more louder. He hadn't known Emily at all before this, but it looks right on her, fitting. Like she's filling herself up again after having shrunk to half her size.

"We aren't together. Our packs are very close, and we hang out a lot, and sometimes one thing would lead to another and—"

"And stuff. Yeah. No need to go into details there, I was a teen not too long ago."

“Really?”

Stiles throws a balled up napkin at her and Emily doesn’t even try to catch it, just lets it miss her face by a couple of inches with an infectious grin in place.

Stiles will miss the kid when she eventually goes back to her pack.

(He still doesn’t tell her about the barbecue sauce on her right cheek, though, because he really was a teen not too long ago. And kind of a dickish one, at that.

Emily still gets the waitress’ phone number.)

 

 

Emily chooses to leave a couple of weeks after Erica is born.

She never tells Stiles why she made this choice, or why Leah came to them in the first place, and Stiles never asks.

When she holds Erica for the last time before getting into Leah’s car, her eyes are glazed over, but she doesn’t cry. She just caresses Erica’s cheek and laughs softly when Erica scrunches her nose, fists going up to her face.

“Your daughter’s really cute,” she tells him then, looking up at him with a wobbly smile.

Stiles smiles back as she watches them drive away.

Even though Stiles has her phone number and her Skype contact, and a promise to keep in touch, it still feels final.

He looks down at Erica’s face, at her dark eyes that blink sleepily, and wonders how it will feel when he has to watch her leave to make a life for herself, the way his dad had to watch him, and Melissa had to watch Scott.

 

 

About two months into single parenthood, Derek comes back to town.

He doesn’t ask questions when he walks into Stiles’ house as though there’s nothing weird about breaking and entering into someone else’s home, because some things just never change, and sees him on the couch with his laptop open on the coffee table in front of him and Erica in his arms, having her post-afternoon-bottle nap.

He just raises an eyebrow and Stiles makes a couple of gestures that roughly amount to _if you wake her up I’ll feed you a wolfsbane smoothie_ , and Derek seems to get the gist of it, since he just rolls his eyes and walks into his kitchen on light feet, coming back a while later with a beer for him and a cup of Stiles’ expensive herbal tea that he only ever drinks when he’s on a bout of insomnia for himself.

After that, Stiles ends up somehow handing Erica over to Derek, so he can finish up a report.

There’s some conversation, questions about Derek’s whereabouts, about what he’s been up to, updates on Stiles’ job, about a thousand anecdotes about Erica— the first time Stiles bathed her and how she’s starting to sleep through the night more often than not, how she’s really smart for a kid her age (“no, really, I know every parent out there thinks that, but she’s brilliant, Derek; she’s a future Nobel prize winner or something, I can tell”), and soon enough it’s time for dinner and he’s done with his report and cradling Erica against his chest, and Derek is giving him shit for not having anything fit to feed an adult in his kitchen, which devolves into Stiles telling Derek exactly how time consuming it is to be a working single dad, even if he’s currently on a leave of sorts, and then it’s just them and their easy banter as Derek tries to make a half-decent stir-fry out of Stiles’ leftovers.

It’s a little strange how easy it is for them to pick their relationship up every time after months of absence— and this time it might be downright bizarre—, but life has been strange since he was sixteen and his best friend became one of the things that go bump in the night.

“So,” he asks through a mouth full of food, “how long are you staying this time, big guy?”

Derek gives him an unimpressed look before looking down at Erica, cradled in his arms and asleep.

“I don’t know,” he says, and there’s something in his voice that has Stiles staring at him, at the way he holds Erica, a weird, tingly little feeling taking over him.

“Huh,” he says, and crams as much stir-fry into his mouth as he can.

 

 

Erica turns three months old, and Derek is still in town.

 

 

"That guy, the one that’s holding Bean, that’s Derek Hale, right?” Emily asks during one of their Skype sessions, and before he can answer, she adds, “Are you doing him?" and leans into the computer, waggling her eyebrows at him ridiculously in a way that he knows she picked up from him.

" _Inappropriate_ ," he yelps, and jams his earphones into his laptop, hissing a little at Emily, who's cracking up.

“If you aren’t, you should be. You should be banging him like a screen door in a hurricane. He is hot. And he looks like he’s good with Bean, like he’d be a good daddy.”

“Bean already has a good daddy,” he tells her, in case she has forgotten. “Here, right here. Sitting in front of this webcam, trying to talk to you about stuff that’s not inappropriate. Like school.”

Emily rolls her eyes at him and leans back on her desk chair.

“Yeah, yeah. Parenthood made you boring, you know?”

“Nah, it hasn’t.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” She squints at something on the screen then and leans closer into it, the light of it reflecting on her face. “What the hell, that’s so cute.”

“What?” He asks, and turns around—

—just to wish he hadn’t.

He makes a weird, high pitched sound.

“I’m so sorry,” he hears Emily say, heartily, through the headphones.

 _You better be_ , he thinks, as he watches Derek Hale blow raspberries on a giggling and kicking baby’s belly.

 _His_ baby’s belly.

“No,” he says.

“ _No_?” Emily asks, confused. “No what?”

“Just _no_. I have to— go. Be somewhere. Call you later in the week, don’t do dumb shit, take care, you know the drill.”

“Yeah, okay, sure, bye,” she says, giving him a little hesitant wave.

He disconnects the call.

_No._

 

 

“I don’t see what the problem is here, Stiles.”

“You are not _listening_ —”

“I am! I’ve been listening for the past hour and a half. And, honestly? It doesn’t make sense. What’s the big deal about Derek playing with Erica all of a sudden? I thought you guys were friends now? Are we revisiting high school? I don’t want to go back to high school, high school _sucked_.”

“You married your high school sweetheart,” he reminds Scott.

“Yeah, and also got almost killed like a hundred times too, remember that?”

“Oh, yeah, right, that too. High school _did_ suck.”

“Yeah.”

“So the thing is—”

“ _Stiles_ —”

“—No, no, hear me out, I’m gonna get straight to the point here— the thing is: I can’t do this dance and song again, okay? I’m not doing it.”

“What? What dance and song, man?”

“You know,” he says, and waves his hand around, smiling when Erica stretches her own arms in the direction of it, as though trying to catch it, “the whole ‘pining for an unattainable person’ thing. I’ve already gone through that a couple of times, and—”

“What? Unattainable— _what_?”

“—and I’m not doing it again. So, you know, fuck Derek.”

“ _What?_ ”

“Yeah,” Stiles says, nodding to himself and then hangs up on Scott.

Yeah, _fuck Derek_.

 

 

Derek just keeps coming over, is the thing.

He seems to be under the delusion that they are _friends_.

Only— shit, they _are_. They have been for years, really, ever since that one FBI raid, and— well, they probably were friends before that too, honestly. There’s only so many times you can save someone’s life and get yours saved in return before you are forced to admit that maybe you don’t really hate each other as much as you’d want other people to think you do. Or at all.

Or that maybe you, y’know, like each other.

Fuck, yes, they are friends, and it makes perfect sense for Derek to be here, helping Stiles with his three months old daughter, because they’ve grown up, become _mature adults_ or something, and Derek is apparently an upstanding member of society who is good with children, _great_ even.

And fuck Derek, but also _fuck_ Derek.

“I can tell you’re thinking about weird shit, you know,” Derek tells him with a smirk, way too pleased with himself as he bounces Erica a couple of times and looks like a fucking dream.

Stiles groans.

 

 

“So,” he asks a couple weeks later, after Derek has dropped by again, unannounced, with a couple of grocery bags and a felt toy for Erica, “when are you leaving, again?”

And if it sounds a little desperate, it’s because he is.

He really, _really_ is.

Derek is— the thing is: when they’re not in mortal peril, Derek is distressingly charming and attractive, and he’s like a baby whisperer, and Stiles has always kind of wanted to bone him, ever since he was a scrawny, horny little shit of a teen who thought he was gonna become Lydia Martin’s kept husband some day, and— he’s just not good at the ‘not falling for unattainable people’ thing. He sucks at it. Big time.

“I’m not,” Derek says then, and Stiles could literally _cry_.

“ _Why?_ ” He asks, and he couldn’t give less of a fuck if he sounds a little unhinged.

“ _Why?_ ” Derek repeats.

“Yeah, _why?_ ” He asks again, running a hand nervously through his hair.

Derek shrugs, and the way he looks at Stiles then is charged, a kind of look that makes Stiles want so many things he shouldn’t want because he’s— he’s not doing this again, he’s an adult, a _father_.

“I think it might be time to stop running,” Derek says then, and he’s suddenly closer than Stiles thought he was, so close that they’re almost touching, and Stiles knows Derek can hear his heart racing, and Stiles thinks back to them falling back together like they just fit every time, like they are both pieces of a same puzzle, no matter how long they’ve spent apart, and maybe— maybe he has no idea at all what he’s doing.

The moment lasts an eternity, the both of them frozen in place, barely inches away from each other, grocery bags at their feet.

“She’s up,” Derek tells him at some point, looking fond and just a touch of something else, and Stiles licks his lips and nods.

“Yeah, uh, I’ll— I’ll go get her.”

He takes a couple of steps towards the staircase when he hears Derek call his name, softly.

“Yeah?” He says, turning his head just enough to look back at Derek—

—and Derek is suddenly _right there_ , cupping his cheek and kissing him, a dry and chaste press of lips that shouldn’t make Stiles’ knees weak, or make his palms sweaty, but hey— this is Beacon Hills and he’s learned to roll with the punches, so he just a exhales shakily and grins to himself when Derek pulls away and walks to the kitchen, climbing the stairs and getting into the nursery with a spring to his step that is almost embarrassing even to himself.

“Hey, Bean,” he says, smiling down at his daughter, and she smiles back at him, waving her fists at him.

 

 

“So, you and Derek?” Scott asks a couple of days later, as soon as he sets foot in his house, nose twitching a little.

“Yup,” he replies, rocking on his feet.

Scott nods then.

“Cool. It was time, man,” he says then, smiling brightly and clapping him on the back.

Stiles just shrugs, smiling back at Scott.

“Yeah, I guess it was.”

 

 

(“So you _are_ banging him like a screen door in a hurricane, good for you.”

“That’s _still_ inappropriate.”)

**Author's Note:**

> [Come hang out with me on tumblr!](http://memekon.tumblr.com)


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